Sybase, Inc. subsidiary, Sybase 365, has released the results of its survey about leading inhibitors of widespread adoption of mobile payments.

According to the company, 40% of survey respondents cited the main inhibitor of widespread mobile payment adoption was a lack of coordination between key stakeholders, including mobile operators, merchants, payment processors, banks and developers.

“For mobile commerce to take off, industry stakeholders must harmonize their efforts in the same way that led to proliferation of SMS and MMS technologies,” said Marty Beard, President, Sybase 365. “In markets where multiple parties are working together, such as mpass Germany and paybox Austria, we have successful ecosystems where end users can pay for a multitude of goods and services via the mobile.”

While NFC will help further enable mobile payments, successful and established mobile technologies, including SMS and USSD are already leading the development of the ecosystem today.

“Mobile channels such as SMS, browser and apps are already being implemented by merchants globally. The challenge facing NFC is how to make the consumer payment experience significantly faster and easier than it already is.” added Beard.

Among 251 attendees polled at GSMA Mobile World Congress last week, 76 percent believe mobile proximity payments using NFC (Near Field Communication) technology is still at least two years away. Once again the lack of industry coordination (30 percent) was the cited as the main culprit for delayed NFC adoption. Other challenges included lack of NFC readers at point-of-sale (26 percent) and inadequate handsets (25 percent) were cited as inhibiting rapid deployment of mobile payments.

Source: Sybase 365